Obama economy gives us more horrible news: Only 151,000 new jobs in August

Let me lay out some things you need if you want to see jobs created:

1. It has to be in the employers’ best interests to hire more people.
2. The cost of the labor has to line up with the benefit employers will receive from it.
3. There has to be consumer demand to justify the increased investment in productivity.
4. The economy has to be growing robustly enough to provide the capital to pay for the labor.
5. There should not be regulatory disincentives to hiring more people.
6. There should not be government-sponsored disincentives for people to work.

If these six conditions are favorable, you will create a lot of jobs. If they’re not, you’ll get a job report like we just got for August, when only 151,000 new jobs were created in the entire country – a figure well below replacement rates given the growth in the overall population, but perfectly in line with a sputtering economy that grew at a rate of only 1.1 percent in the second quarter. The Obama economy is a river of crap that just keeps flowing. And it’s easy to see why. Look at the six items I listed above. Obama’s entire economic philosophy disincentivizes work. He’s expanded food stamps and Medicare, and many times he’s extended unemployment benefits beyond when they’re supposed to expire. He’s made it easy for people to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26. He’s trying to make it easy for college students not to pay back their student loans. All of these have traditionally been reasons people try hard to get a job or to keep one. You need that money to take care of these things. You need food. You need health insurance. You have financial obligations to meet. If someone else meets these needs for you, there’s less imperative for you to work. This is why labor force participation is at its lowest rate since the Carter Administration. Because incentives to work are under attack by this administration.

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Then there’s the employer side. Having 50 or more employees forces you to provide health insurance under ObamaCare. You can argue that this is a good employment practice regardless of the law, but the point is that it has to be your choice. Many businesses operate on tight margins and adding that 50th employee subjects them to an additional cost they may not be able to handle. So they keep their workforce small. The federal government is also pressuring employers to pay more for entry-level workers than they are worth in many cases, which complicates the proposition of hiring because if you pay more than the worker can give you back in value-added productivity, you’re losing money on the deal. It makes more sense to never hire that person in the first place. And finally, because Obama’s overall economic philosophy is hostile to productivity and profits, we’ve had horrendously slow economic growth, making the capital that would pay for new labor hard to come by. With ObamaCare collapsing, job growth stalled, economic growth slow and the deficit once again soaring, there’s no rescuing Obama’s economic record. It’s an utter disaster, and there it will stay for history to judge. We’re never going to see sustained job growth any better than this until we elect a president who doesn’t hate business, wealth and profits. Of the two candidates we have to choose from this year, I don’t think it’s hard to figure out which one fits that description.